


The Death of Tim Property

by YUUNGMASTER



Category: Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: 40k, Grimdark, Imperial Guard, WH40K, War, Warhammer - Freeform, Warhammer 40k - Freeform, tyranids - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-09 06:57:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20990708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YUUNGMASTER/pseuds/YUUNGMASTER
Summary: Planetary Defense Force Trooper Tim Property's gear is light, but on him, it feels heavy. His world, Yetuine, has come under assault by the forces of the Tyranid, and surviving six-months alone, he must crawl through the carnage to reach the capital, where he can only hope to find those close to him.A made-for-RPG short-story, get a glimpse into the life of a PDF soldier in the grimdark future of the 42nd Millennium, and the unstoppable foe he faces in defense of his ruined home.





	1. Through The Ruins

‘My P-D-F- issued flak armour is light, only about seven kilograms. My additional gear; food I’ll never eat, bandages I won't apply fast enough, only three kilograms all-together. My most important piece of gear, my only salvation aside from The God Emperor’s mercy, is my chemically-powered Autogun. Two-point-three kilograms, it's the lightest thing I carry with me, but these days it feels the heaviest.’

Tim Property, a Planetary Defense Force soldier, stationed on a world called Yetuine, spoke into a data-slate, recording his last words for somebody to find, if they would ever find it. He’d kneel by a makeshift camp-fire, formed out of garbage shoved compactly into a steel barrel, surrounded by the ruins of what was once a strong manufactorum, the same one that Tim had worked at in his youth. Daylight was quickly fading, though the sun’s radiance had been blocked out by flaming smog and whatever lay beyond that thick layer, long ago. Tim grimaced, clenching his teeth as he thought of the prospect of night. Though he had been on-the-run for six months now, surviving in the caliginous hours of night was almost always nearly impossible. He had to thank the God Emperor of Mankind for the days he did not perish alone, ravaged by the long-clawed arms of his terrible enemy, consumed to feed their bottomless hunger. Tim had heard horror stories of the Tyranid, the awful swarm that lurks in the corners of the stars, pouncing on world to world. He had prayed it would never have happened to his. Even then, Tim acknowledged the difference of this foe to the kind he was prepared to face, to the Tyranid he was tasked with destroying. It melted his nerves to think about, so he switched his thoughts to one word: Survival. Already, he could hear the screaming of the swarm beyond the horizon, his alert to hide himself where he couldn't be found. His Commanding Officer would have ruined him for this, even tried him for cowardice and had him hung, but his Commanding Officer was dead, and Tim had no intention to join him in a battle-field grave. Alone, and left with only grit and ammunition, Tim left the fire behind, crouching low whilst passing through the mountain of devastated rubble, crushing destroyed machine and material under his boot. His dataslate rested heavy in his pocket, bouncing around along with a single frag grenade he had taken off of the dead in his escape from the enemy. While he moves fast, he knew he couldn't possibly move fast enough, so grateful was he when he heard the sound of cracking Lasgun fire, from his estimates, nine Kilometers from his position. The Imperial Guard had been here since the first invasion, but like him, they were stuck, and had no dead Commanding Officer to escape from. He had never personally see them, but to survive this long spoke volumes to Tim, and he just thanked their coming, even if he was hearing the final desperate shots of a decaying force. Clearing his goggles from the perspiration that had hazed them, Tim looked toward the capital of Yetuine, where he remembered it, northward. This was a double-edged sword, as though it provided the soldier with a goal to survive for, to get into the capital and find his living comrades, the skies were as they always were: filled with falling rocks, gargantuan meteorites that cracked with molten flame. If his twin-sibling, and those with him, had survived the harrowing six-months time that they were forced to separate, they had to have been on the end of their rope, as Tim was. Carrying on, Tim could not help but remember the ghosts of that terrible day. Tim, and his brother-twin, Tom, had grouped with numbers of survivors of the initial attack, and they stuck like Mars-glue for months, but then, one of those meteorites struck, the same kind he could not take his wary-gaze off of now. It hit, cindering the ground, and melting into everything it’s lava clasped to. On opposite ends of this ruin, Tim tried to return to his fellows, but what came from these meteorites inspired him to flee until his legs were shot with pain and tears. The Tyranids, themselves corrupted by that terrible lava, had sullied forth to destroy, and Tim escaped only by the will of his God Emperor, using an underground passage-way, and his fellow survivors, to make enough distance between him and everything else. He had fled, a cowardly act only seen this way by the fallen, like his Officer. Tim spit on the ground, turning his look back out toward what lay ahead. And what did lay in his path, through the two-story rubble, other than what Tim could recognize as a veteran member of Yetuine’s Kill-Squad force. The best of the Planetary Defense Force, the first to face the first wave of Tyranid. Tim, although not recognising this helmet-less figure, recognized his colours, and so he called out to him.

‘Hey! Sir, this way’ Tim called out, shout-whispering, so that they may not be assaulted suddenly by the hated enemy. The Kill-Squadroniere responded with silence, standing in place, but taking some steps backwards toward Tim. Tim, though confused, was grateful he wasn't a propped up corpse, like a puppet on strings. As the man’s backward steps were met with Tim’s forward ones, Tim extended a free hand out, taking one off his Autogun and placing it on the charred shoulder-piece of the other soldier. The man responded now, turning, and Tim let loose a gasp of shock and horror at the sight of the man’s twisted features: bubbled-up pulsating pores, terrible indents revealing the bone under his face, and low-hanging tissue littering his face. The Kill-Squadroniere shrieked like a woman assaulting a burglar with a shock-stick, and attempted to slam the butt of his Lasrifle into the sharpened jaw of Tim, who ducked low but was caught in the stomach with a knee that reached just under his flak-plate. Tim felt the air immediately escape him, and as he fell, vomit rippled out of his stomach, onto the man and himself as the sudden engagement went to the ground, with Tim’s neck clenched tightly by the large hands of the broken-soldier. Due to the swiftness of the struggle, small chunks of the swinging-meat from the face of Tim’s assailant fell onto his, and Tim’s nerves immediately struck out in reaction, as the skin burnt, it burnt terribly. Struggling, and knowing he’ll die if the man on top of him isnt ended soon, Tim contended with each second counting his doom. Desperate, Tim gave up trying to pull the massive arms of the man off of his throat, and went to his pocket, where the Dataslate had been. Tim had enough room in this clutch to take it, remove it, and with the thing, Tim struck against the side of the corrupted trooper’s head. Then, Tim did it again, and again, and again, then, when the balance shifted and Tim was now standing over his former PDF comrade, he struck him again, coating the Dataslate in red human blood where Tim had never drew it before. He kept going, even after the little false-life faded from the dead man’s eyes, until there was nothing Tim was looking at could register as a former human-being. Only then, did Tim come to his senses, noting the lack of far-off Lasgun fire, and run, breaking into a sprint now. There was a recognizable pattern of bodies he had been following the capital, bodies he remembered he had left behind. But it was still so far off, and he was exhausted, and he could hear the shreeches of the swarm draw closer, unopposed by the forces of Mankind. So, Tim took a detour from his current path, remembering this route not just for the bodies that sprawled across it, but that it was his home as a child, these streets were once his to wander proud, and now he crept through them in fear and strife. Tim remembered the days in the manufactorum, and where he and his brother Tom would deliver steel beams and necessary materials to the capital’s main vehicle production facility. Tim hadnt expected anything to be left, but he was willing to make the attempt to search, and so he did. As he came upon the path toward the facility, he spotted, like flares in the night, Tyranid. Dropping molten lava where they crawled, not only did the Tyranid seek to consume Yetuine, they sought to burn it to ash as well. Tim raised his weapon, peering down the sight, and shook his head. He would do nothing before he died. In vain, he would be killed without a soul to witness his sacrifice. So he reached once more into his pockets, dropping his Autogun to the ground, in favor of gripping the large frag grenade, and sizing up where he would throw it. As he prepared, stanced like a ball-player, the enemy smelled him, adorned in the crimson blood of humankind, and when they came to him, Tim released the frag, letting it drop fifteen feet from him, five from the Tyranid group. They were small things for their ilk, luckily, splintered from their brood. When they, three in number, came to murder, they came upon the frag grenade, which exploded, peltering the things with dozens of large shrapnel pieces, and though one of them survived this, screaming for revenge, Tim had his “Stubber” back in his hands, and unloaded his entire clip into the monster, determined to halt its advance before it turned his bones to ash. It was fast, he acknowledged, too fast. His weapon clicked, spent of its ammunition, before he could kill his foe, and he would have accepted his fate to die if his hand had not instinctively went toward the combat-knife that lay on his belt. When the Hormagaunt neared close, so close its putrid inflamed stench could overload Tim’s senses, he threw the knife, and it cut through air indeed before it came to a resting spot deeply embedded within the skin of the injured menace. The knife soon corroded, melting away, but Tim had no time to reflect. The enemy was coming upon him, he could hear how they surrounded his position, so he sprinted, neglecting to take even his Autogun, two-point-three kilograms of weight abandoned, the lightest piece of his kit had ceased to be the heaviest, and Tim was renewed with energy. He made a desperate dash toward the widely opened factory doors, God-Emperor be praised only 70% destroyed by the actions of both the ground-forces and the space-invaders. All around, Tim knew that the Tyranid broods would flood the facility soon, and that some vermin already call this place their domain. So when he dived inside, crawling under rubble and into a holding-area, it was as if the God Emperor himself had come to Yetuine to grant him a means of salvation: A singular Tauros Rapid Assault Vehicle, repurposed with the goal of delivering workers across large bodies of land quicker than with a normal Tauros-pattern, so while it only had a heavy-stubber mounted on its back, what it lacked it made up for in speed. Tim gave his thanks, and climbed inside the driver’s pit, and as he tried to turn the thing on, as fast as he could whilst the walls around him became slowly engulfed by flame, and ripped by Tyranid, he invoked the litany of ignition.

_‘_ _The soul of the Machine God surrounds thee. The power of the Machine God invests thee. The hate of the Machine God drives thee. The Machine God endows thee with life. Live!’_

A half second later, the Tauros lit up with life, and its first brave act was plowing through the weak doors of the facility, and out into the open road, lighting up a dozen of the Hormagaunt Brood with it’s vehicle-lights. Tim swerved the vehicle, manipulating its path away from the xenos, and back toward where he had been, on the road to the capital. As he pressed his foot upon the pedal, pushing the Tauros to its max speed, where the capital lay only a twenty-minute departure, Tim felt the aliens on his heel, and looking back, so they were. Tim did what he could, trying to narrow out the vehicle, put it on a straight path, and so he did. The route lay forward, but the enemy encroached closer. No, hope began to fade, they would surely descend upon him in seconds. He looked to the aliens, salivating molten, and back toward the capital that was now in sight. He would have to have both. Tim took his supply bag, three kilograms in weight, and dropped it onto the Tauro’s pedal, and now only carrying the burden of seven kilograms, he stood up, using the Tauro’s top as support so he wouldn't fall and shatter his bones into death at such high speeds. As Tim climbed, slowly maneuvering around the side of the vehicle, the hot wind blew fiercely against him, pushing back his hair, and blinding his eyes. With staunch determination, he jumped, just barely reaching forward enough to clutch onto the top of the Tauro’s back-end. His feet hovered just above the ground, and his boot even touched for a moment, shredding as if it went through a grinder. The Hormagaunts, a dozen he could count, were on him now, close enough to grab, and they would have sank their claws into his flesh had he not pulled upward, and jumped into the cold steel of the gunner’s pit. Straight away, as the steel exterior just begun to be clawed into, did Tim place himself on the Heavy-Stubber turret, and squeeze down hard onto the firing mechanism. The weapon exploded into action, firing heavy into the nearest alien, until it was left abandoned by the speed of the vehicle, a roadside casualty to be felt by their brood. Tim clenched his jaw until it felt as if his teeth would shatter and break, and he spat the words,

_ ‘Machine Spirit, accept my benediction, and kill.’ _

Tim did not take a rest in firing, putting his life into the hands of the mounted-gun. The road was laid to waste, fuel canisters blew fire and steel, Tim did everything to halt the xenos from reaching him. It must have been futile, because as he was firing away, almost deaf from the noise, and blind from the exhaust seeping from the overloaded gun, Tim felt something heavy collided head-on with the Tauros, and all went black.


	2. Man Rising

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PDF Trooper Tim Property wakes from what will surely be his grave, and has to push himself to his absolute limit in order to just carry on his fight against the xenos that have ushered flame to his world, his home.

The world seemed to swirl around Tim Property, moving slow but faster than he could ever hope to catch up to. His eyes opened, by the grace of the God Emperor, and he could smell fuel, lots of spilt fuel. He tried standing, but every bone in his body ached and screamed in sharp, hot pain. He huffed, cursing this fortune, ‘Am I going to die here?’. The night was only illuminated to him by the descent of those awful meteorites, and it was a reminder that he was not dead yet. Tim, using a desperate kind of physicality, flipped himself onto his stomach, and began crawling forward. His destination, the capital, was incredibly close, and now all he had to do was crawl the distance between him and his comrades. His eyes fixated on the ruins that made up the city, and the focus blurred his mind, so when the Tauros exploded in a great ball of flame, he could hardly notice or bring himself to greatly care. The Tauros had been trashed, and by all means it should have been Tim’s grave, but fate would deal him a different hand. Once he crawled far enough, he reached a small pile of corpses that had been stuck together amidst the ruin, and Tim used them as pillars to pull himself up from the ground, and onto his feet. His back was getting cooked by the radiant flames of the ruined Tauros, and that pain urged him to push forward, and so he did. He had no weapon, and the lack of one made the PDF Trooper feel more naked than he felt, with his almost completely ripped and burned armour, now crushed in by the impact of the crash. Tim, as minutes passed, felt more and more tired, as if he wanted to simply lay down and die and allow the misery of the past six months to disappear in that eternal sleep. Desperately he wanted to sleep, but he knew full well by now the price of failure for a servant of the God Emperor who still had the capability of fighting. He had enough. Tim Property dropped to his knees, and slammed his jaw shut tightly, and put both of his hands against his left eye, and it twitched in response to the contact, and it stung immensely as he dug his fingers into the space between eye and skull, and clawed in. Tim screamed viciously, at the end of his mental rope, and began tearing fabric and tissue, trying to force his left eye from its place, draining it of blood and liquid. The pain made him cry, but he was only wrathful, and soon he ceased to see out of that eye, and soon it would be dislocated from its socket, and soon it would fall dead to the earth as he severed its connection using his clawed fingers. He was fully awake now, writhing in pain. He would not fall to the temptations of sleep. His armour was abandoned, those extra kilograms now put aside, leaving Tim as he originally was: man. He removed his undershirt, which was coated in sweat and blood, and began to fold its edges, tying them together, until it produced something similar to a bandana that he wrapped around his head, covering his left eye tightly; a makeshift bandage that would simply have to hold tight until he died or found something better. Tim took the dataslate he carried with him into his grip, the blood on it having dried to a dark dried red.

‘Ive learned something new about the God Emperor, what it means for him to love. Its not a warm embrace, but its a smacking to get you into order. Ive been smacked good and hard enough, and I think the next smack’ll kill me, so I’ll hope I don’t screw up.’ Tim had been using a nearby fence to keep himself upward, and he pushed off it, getting into the middle of the street, searching for a balance of his own.

‘I never stopped to think much about the weight of my gear until it became something like dead weight. Maybe I’m alive because I dont have it, and all the dead lads from my company thought it’d serve ‘em as they served it. Wishy-washy dead-men, I say.’ Tim kept walking, but had to stop talking because of the pain riveting in his mind, and placed his dataslate back into his pocket. He was coming upon a familiar place now, and yes, would find a familiar face, though there was no life in the fellow’s expression. Tim looked upon the corpse of his Commanding Officer, the man he swore an eternal of servitude to, until they both died or the contract expired. Tim knelt, and offered some respect, but went to the officer’s gear.

‘One of us has to keep shootin’, or else we’ll die for nothing. I hope you kept it warm.’ Tim took the Officer’s laspistol, a step up from the Autogun, and then Tim took his identification tags, and wrapped them around his neck to rest near his own.

‘I hope a priest’ll come soon. They say you cant go to the God Emperor’s side on unblessed ground. Hope thats not a fact, or else he’ll be missing out on a few unaccounted for folks.’ Tim stood back up, and turned the laspistol to it’s automatic setting, and broke into a small jog now. His destination was just up ahead, and so was judgement. He could only hope to be judged favourably.


End file.
